Sunpu Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

In the heart of Shizuoka, Sunpu Castle was the last residence of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Edo shogunate. Ieyasu began building it in 1585 on the site of the former residence of the Imagawa, in whose household he had been a hostage in his youth, and he moved in as early as 1586. Transferred to Kantō in 1590, he entrusted the castle to Nakamura Kazuuji, then took it back after Sekigahara to make it, from 1607 onwards, the residence from which he continued to govern as a "retired shogun". The reconstruction of 1607, carried out with the labour levied from the daimyō, gave the castle a seven-storey keep; it was there that Ieyasu received John Saris and William Adams in 1613, during the first English trading mission to Japan. A fire destroyed most of the buildings in 1635, and the keep was never rebuilt. After the Meiji Restoration, the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, retired to Sunpu, and from 1896 the Imperial Army occupied the inner enclosure. Having become a municipal park after 1949, the site has regained several structures rebuilt using traditional techniques: the Tatsumi corner turret (1989), the Higashi-gomon gate (1996) and the Hitsujisaru turret, while the foundations of the keep are displayed in the open air.